Category Archives: OSMF Working Groups

The Data Working Group is conducting a survey as part of its work on a policy covering paid mapping.

When OpenStreetMap started, it was largely a project of hobbyists contributing to OSM in their spare time. They chose freely what to map and which tools to use, and they took individual responsibility for their contributions.

The continuing growth and popularity of OSM have also brought more and more organised mapping efforts, mostly in the form of companies setting up paid data teams to improve OSM data in specific regions or for specific use cases, but also unpaid groups like school classes that are directed to work on OSM.

These organised mapping efforts are an integral part of today’s OSM contribution landscape and, when done well, help make OSM better and more widely known.

In order to ensure good communication, and a level playing field, between individual community members and organised editing groups, the OSMF Data Working Group has been tasked with developing guidelines for organised groups. These guidelines will above all set out some transparency requirements for organised groups – things that are already voluntarily followed by most groups today, like informing the mapping community about which accounts edit for the team.

We have prepared the following survey with a few questions about such a policy to give us a better understanding of what the mapping community expects from such a policy. The survey is aimed at everyone editing (or planning to edit) in OSM, whether as individual mappers or as part of a team, and your answers will help us in fleshing out a draft policy.

Within the scope of the survey, and the policy to be written, we define paid mapping (or paid editing) as any editing in OSM performed by someone who is told by a third party what to map (and potentially also how to map it) and who receives money in exchange. We define other organised mapping (or editing) as any editing that is also steered by a third party, but where no money is paid.

OpenStreetMap has a map display, and more importantly a database of raw map data, and more importantly than that a community of map contributors! All of these things require servers. Big computer systems crunching lots of data and handling lots of internet traffic. This is the realm of the “Operations Working Group“, who make the decisions and take the actions that keep these servers ticking, and keep OpenStreetMap (the map, the database, and the community) up and running.

The OpenStreetMap project is nearly 12 years old, and we’ve been very lucky to have a small team of talented volunteer system administrators doing a fantastic job over that time, spending donated money wisely and meeting some huge scaling challenges for the core infrastructure.

“There’s a pride in keeping OpenStreetMap humming along and not causing too much of a fuss”

But increasingly OWG have been quietly enhancing their server configuration management approaches. All code/configuration scripts are maintained openly in github, and recently the team are looking to make this easier to test, so more people can feel confident in proposing improvements to the server set-up.

“The goal is to allow future developers to improve each cookbook using only their own laptops”

Back in August we announced the formation of the Engineering Working Group, tasked with trying to attract more developers by lowering barriers to entry. Since then we’ve seen some good technical coding work and other achievements in and around the activities of this group:

OpenStreetMap is now rolling with rails version 3, thanks largely to the hard-working Tom Hughes. Besides deploying it, and ironing out a few nasty problems with sessions, he did the work of porting the code over. The website and API code needed to take account of differences and new features of rails 3, particularly the use of AREL for database querying.

Kai Krueger has packaged this rails code, and also Mapnik and mod_tile, into an unbuntu PPA. This packaging system offers a very simple way to install these tools (and keep them up to date) on ubuntu/debian . We’re currently testing this, and hope it’ll make it much easier for developers to hack on the code for openstreetmap.org.

Working with Mike Migurski we have a more attractive, and more helpful page sitting at planet.openstreetmap.org, the OpenStreetMap data downloads site. Mike, and stamen design, are also now providing “metro extracts” – more manageable (smaller) files for OpenStreetMap data, one city at a time.

In addition to these, the Engineering Working Group has dived head first into the big tasks of improving technical documentation, and tidying up the bug tracker.

Clearly these are things which would happen anyway within the OpenStreetMap developer community, and the achievements are down to the hard work of individual people. But the Engineering Working Group lends a little structure, and provides a forum for taking a step back and looking at these kinds of meta-development. Development which helps development!

London Hack Weekend – 26th, 27th

Perhaps you’d prefer to join in face-to-face? Come along to a “hack weekend”! EWG is also involved in this, and trying to get more developer events happening, in more locations. For the moment though we have one coming up at the end of the week…

“An OpenStreetMap ‘hack weekend’ is a meet-up where we bring along laptops to an office space and spend the weekend doing some technical work to improve OpenStreetMap. This may be development of the “core” components, the editors, or any other side projects and pet projects we fancy hacking on. OpenStreetMap has development tasks sprouting from it in all directions. There’s work to do in almost any programming language, as well as tasks like documentation, and even some non-technical graphics design and translation tasks.

We mostly take a fairly unstructured free-form format. People turn up and start beavering away on something, or they turn up and see what they can help with. However we can also run more structured workshops if there is demand”

Whether you can make it to a hack weekend or not, we are always looking for more technical people to help with improving OpenStreetMap.